Enterprises now organize and store information across a wide variety of physical facilities. Employees no longer work at single locations for a single enterprise. Moreover, employees have devices and network capabilities to remotely log into an enterprise's network from virtually anywhere across the globe using a plethora of different devices.
All this increased accessibility and mobility require more administration and security than what has been available in the past. To make administration easier directory services are often deployed by enterprises. These directory services logically represent enterprise assets, such as users, machines, files, etc. Tools and Application Programming Interfaces (API's) provide the ability for administrators to assign asset attributes that define security and other actions that are permissible on those assets. Such abilities allow for automated support and maintenance, which reduce support staff and corresponding expenses of the enterprises.
Some visualization tools permit graphical viewing a network tree that shows the hierarchical nature of an enterprise's assets. These tools have limited capabilities and often separate tools or API's not fully integrated with the visualization tools are needed for modifying the attributes of the enterprise assets. That is, a series of tools are needed for efficient maintenance.
In addition, when administrators want to test new actions or attributes for enterprise assets, such testing usually occurs in a mirrored testing environment where the tools are duplicated and separately maintained. In many cases, separate machines are used in the testing environments. These circumstances add to an enterprise's support staff, equipment, and maintenance (for supporting dual versions of the directory API's and tools).
Thus, what are needed are improved techniques for policy configuration and stimulation.